I really wanted to like The Walking Dead. I love the comic, and when I heard that Frank Darabont was involved, I was relieved. He was the man behind my favourite film ending ever – The Mist. There are far too many hacks out there who buy the rights to popular comics, ignore the original fan-base, and then turn the TV series into a pile of garbage.

Darabont was different. He seemed to genuinely want to please the fans. He wanted to capture the essence of The Walking Dead, and broadcast it on television so everybody could enjoy the story of how humanity consumes itself when faced with near extinction. So people who didn’t read comics could finally see what we’d all been raving about for the last 7 years.

After watching the first episode, I was still living in my dream world, where everything was right in the world. Frank Darabont had done it – he’d pulled off the comic to TV show conversion, and he hadn’t messed it up. He was my hero.

We’re introduced to Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), a Sheriff’s deputy who wakes up from a coma after the Zombie Apocalypse has wiped out the majority of Atlanta’s population, turning them into the walking dead. He holds out hope that his family are still alive, so sets off to one of the city’s “Survival Centres” to see if either of them made it out in time. It’s all very faithful to the first couple of issues of the comic, and I hoped that it was a sign that good things lay in wait further down the series.

Then the second episode. A small voice pipes-up inside me. It wants to know who the new characters are.

I tell it there are bound to be some artistic changes. It can’t be exactly like the comic, or there’d be no point in making it. Look at Kubrick’s The Shining. In a way, it’s better than Stephen King’s version, and Darabont, being Stephen King’s right hand man, will appreciate that we appreciate that.
I let it go.

At one point in this episode Rick and his new buddy Glenn (Steven Yeun) are chased by a horde of Zombies until they’re backed into a corner – it’s all okay though, because Glenn has cunningly steered them towards a building’s fire escape ladder. As they make their escape, using the simple looking, but in fact incredibly complicated feat of hand/eye co-ordination, hand-over-hand method of climbing the ladder, none of the zombies follow them.

Zombies, you see, are dead. They lack the basic motor skills to pull off a move as impressive as ladder climbing. It’s unlikely they’re ever going to be able to learn how to do it. Even a briskly paced jog is pushing it a bit for the undead. The longer they remain animated, the more decomposed they become until they’re just a pile of mush on legs.

The voice in my head remains silent, satisfied that Darabont has stayed true to one of the main tenets of zombie lore:

Death is a disability, not a superpower. – Simon Pegg

Then, one of them jumps a fence.

Rick Grimes is running away from a herd of zombies, gets to chain linked fence, goes through the gate, locks it behind him – and one of the zombies jumps the f***ing fence.

He doesn’t scrabble up the fence.

He doesn’t clamber up the fence.

He pulls off a graceful, one handed, legs not touching the top, LEAP over to the other side, such is his desire to sample Rick Grimes’ flesh.

The voice is shouting so loudly now that I can feel blood welling up in my tear ducts and ear canals.

“If they can’t climb ladders, how the hell can they leap a fence?”

I try and appease the voice by telling it that it was probably just an over enthusiastic extra. It looked cool, so it made the final cut. TV works like that.

But it only gets worse.

I could go on like this through the entire season, but it’s just making me angry, and I hate resorting to plot spoilers to pad out a review.

The main appeal of the comic was that it wasn’t a fast paced, kick ass, shotguns vs zombies style story. It was more about the consequences of a Zombie Apocalypse, and how a group of survivors tries to maintain some semblance of humanity while the world around them falls apart. Zombies were merely incidental.

My concern about the show, before I watched it, was that the producers and writers would find the comic’s plot too slow and uneventful for it to make a filmable story arc, so they’d have to pad it out with episode after episode of nerve shredding action. In truth, the complete opposite is true of The Walking Dead TV series. They’ve actually found a way to make the story more uneventful, and for the plot to unfold at such a snail’s pace that by the third, fourth and fifth episode I was actually zoning out while watching it.

I’d find myself, phone in hand, looking at Twitter, Facebook or maybe some pictures of kittens with a humorous slogan superimposed over the top of them. Basically, everywhere but the television screen.

It’s hard to tell whether the acting’s any good, because the dialogue is so clunky that everyone always seems to be telling someone how they feel about something. Well, everybody except the comedy relief black guy, T-Dog (IronE Singleton), whom the production company seem to have added to ensure they make their diversity targets (this is an insult in itself – the black characters in The Walking Dead comic are so well crafted, and such an integral part to the plot that it would have been a lot more dignified, and a lot less insulting, if they’d just written them into the show a little earlier rather than supply the series with a token placeholder who talks like he’s just been lifted out of “Bad Boys III – Aw no they di’int: The shit just got so real you can taste it. Fo sho!”)

That’s another thing – I had to google T-Dog’s name. The characters are so badly developed, I’m not even sure what their names are, let alone what their relationship is to one another. T-Dog seems to be quite close to Jacqui (Jeryl Prescott), but we never know why. They both happen to be black, so maybe they’re related. Maybe they’re in a relationship. Maybe they used to attend the same book group? We’ll never know, as the series never gets around to telling us. Same goes for the relationship between Andrea (Laurie Holden) and Dale (Jeffrey DeMunn). By the final episode Dale’s behaving like there’s something “a little bit more” to their relationship. But we, the audience, have been kept in the dark thus far if there has been a romance blossoming, which makes Dale’s behaviour come across as completely unexpected, and a little bit creepy.

The final nail in the coffin for me was The Walking Dead‘s depiction of women. They are quite clearly the weaklings in this mind numbing apocalypto-drama, and they needn’t have been. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in the writers’ complete rebranding of Andrea during the character’s transfer from Comic to TV screen. In the comic she’s a hard as nails, take no prisoners bad ass who gets her hands just as dirty as the male characters. In the show she’s a neurotic, sit on the floor of the bathroom rocking, delicate little flower. Well done AMC.

The Wire, Dexter and True Blood have set the bar ludicrously high for American drama, and I was hoping The Walking Dead would match their standard, if not set a new one.

I don’t think the writers even tried.

But then, America and the UK seem to love it. People love it. Hell, even fans of the comic love it.

I refuse to join them. God knows I tried to like this TV show. I lied to myself for three full episodes before I caved and shouted obscenities at the television. It would take all the double think in the world for me to convince myself that The Walking Dead was any good.

It’s not that it’s not a good comic book adaptation, that’s beside the point.

It’s not a good television show.

It has zombies, headshots, people in peril – but it still manages to be boring. That’s quite an achievement.

1*/5

*- The one is given very grudgingly due to the quality of the first episode, and due to the real, albeit fantastically slim, possibility that in season 2 Rick might wake up from his coma AGAIN, rendering the first series an elaborate dream.